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Born in Jerusalem in 1961, Miko Peled grew up in a well known Zionist family. His father, Matti Peled, was a young officer in the war of 1948, and a general in the war of 1967. His grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson, was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Coming from an elite family in Israel, he has undergone a transformation in his thinking through his increasingly close and warm relations with Palestinians. Of his recently published book, The General’s Son, Miko says: “It’s time to sweep away some of the myths, and to uncover the truth so that we can finally live in peace, together.”

He begins with the myth of 1948, a land without a people for people without a land:

“It turns out that the creation of Israel had not, after all, been a haphazard fight in which the Arabs fled their homes at the directive of their own leaders, but it had been an unprovoked, systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish militia involving massacres, terrorism and the wholesale looting of an entire nation.”

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, says in her forward to The General’s Son “There are few books on the Israel/Palestine issue that seem as hopeful to me as this one.”